My business card says, Blu Carraway Investigations, Charleston, South Carolina. Sounds impressive, but most of the time I’m more of a glorified problem solver.

A woman calls about a cheating husband:

“Do you want pictures or compound fractures?” I say, jokingly.

She says, “That bastard. I want pictures of compound fractures!”

It’s like that sometimes.

I have a business partner. Well, really I had a business partner. He took off three years ago after our last big job. Can’t blame the guy—we almost died. A young woman vacationing in Mexico gets kidnapped. Her father’s a big-baller here in the lowcountry. The kidnappers know she’s rich, but don’t know her father got that way because he wasn’t a big fan of rules.

Mick Crome, my business partner, and I head south of the border to get her. I’m part Cuban on my mother’s side and both Crome and I speak the language. Thanks to a little luck and a lot of intelligence paid for by our client, we find out which cartel has the girl. They want a quarter million. Our client wants to prove a point.

We negotiate terms not with the kidnappers but their counterparts. Six dead kidnappers later, we have the girl back in the U.S. and there’s a new regime in charge back at the cartel. The client is so happy, we get a monster bonus. After settling all our debts, Crome and I split the leftovers and he hops on his motorcycle and heads to Key West.

I get it. His only commitment is to his Harley. I’ve got a small nine-acre island and a scraggly herd of free roaming Carolina Marsh Tackey horses to take care of. And I’ve also got Billie Day, a woman I’ve known forever and who is destined to be with me if I ever get my act together.

Except after I got out of the Rangers in the nineties, I married someone else and had a daughter. Her name is Hope. Hope is a better person at twenty than I am at forty-four. She’s beautiful because, fortunately for her, she’s got her mother’s looks. All she got from me was my eyes and Latin skin. Her mother and I are no longer together which is why I’m trying hard to do right by Billie. A three-year party in Key West with Crome would do me no good.

A victim of my own success, word got around about the Mexico job. I heard some potential clients have gone elsewhere, deciding the way Crome and I handle things might bring more liabilities than assets. I don’t fault them. My record is clean, thanks to that big-baller client and his limitless resources. The only information in any official database is my private investigation license and my driver’s license.

There’s still the occasional snoop job or tail assignment, and so far that’s been enough to keep the lights on at home. But I had to close the downtown office and sell off the cars we used for surveillance. It’s a tough business.

And I wouldn’t give it up to do anything else.

You can read more about Blu in Blu Heat, the “Blu Carraway” mystery novella.

A man walks into a bar, and dies. It isn’t just any bar, it’s the Pirate’s Cove located on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island just north of the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. Ex-Marine Brack Pelton tries to stop the murder and almost dies himself. The victim, Skip Romeo, has a shady past and some interesting friends. The friend he’d planned on meeting at the bar before he got shot was lowcountry Private Investigator Blu Carraway.

Brack Pelton hates that someone shot up his bar and Blu Carraway hates that someone gunned down his friend. Both want revenge and justice. And both tend to leave a lot of collateral damage in their wake. Their team-up is inevitable. Individually, they’re each a force to be reckoned with. Together, they’re like an atomic bomb blast at ground zero. Pelton and Carraway and Charleston will never be the same.

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About the author
David Burnsworth became fascinated with the Deep South at a young age. After a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Tennessee and fifteen years in the corporate world, he made the decision to write a novel. Big City Heat is his fourth mystery. Having lived in Charleston on Sullivan’s Island for five years, the setting was a foregone conclusion. He and his wife call South Carolina home. Connect with David at davidburnsworthbooks.com, on Twitter and on Facebook.

All comments are welcomed.

Blu Heat is available at online booksellers.